


Keeping Up Appearances

by samariumwriting



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Minor Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Nonbinary My Unit | Byleth, Past Character Death, Trans Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 15:10:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20530079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Felix did not make a habit of looking in the mirror. He didn't see the point, and he rarely found anything good to say about his own face. But when the legacy of the dead followed him around like a shadow, it felt like everyone wanted to say their piece on his appearance.





	Keeping Up Appearances

**Author's Note:**

> A general content warning here for some aspects of dealing with loss (badly, because it's Felix lmao) and gender dysphoria. It doesn't get super physical or anything but if that's not for you then feel free to dip out!
> 
> This fic covers elements all the way through the game to a post-game world, but there actually aren't really any spoilers. Somehow.

Felix did not make a habit of looking in the mirror. As a rule, he didn’t care for how he looked, and he was dimly aware that he had been in the bad habit of seeing things that just weren’t there. His face was too round, his lips too wide, his shoulders not broad enough, his eyelashes too long, everything about himself had disgusted him at one point or another.

So maybe he didn’t really know exactly what he looked like. Maybe the closest he got to knowing his appearance was in the distorted reflection of a sword.

He didn’t know if it hurt or not, when Ingrid took one look at him in their first day of class at the Academy and said he looked like Glenn.

He supposed it wasn’t unexpected. Glenn had been a little taller than him, a little broader, his hair a bit shorter. But their hair colour was the same, their eyes slightly different shades of brown.

The worst thing was that he distinctly remembered Ingrid calling Glenn ‘dashingly handsome’ when they were younger. When Felix and Ingrid were twelve and Glenn was sixteen, and they’d both gone to visit Dimitri and Glenn in Fhirdiad.

Their territories practically neighboured each other, but Felix hadn’t seen Ingrid for a year, two years maybe. They weren’t friends anymore. Their interests didn’t overlap all that much. There was no reason for them to spend any time together, even. No point.

So when she saw him for the first time in years and her first reaction was that he looked like Glenn, Felix would admit that he froze. Maybe it was anger, maybe it was...fear. He wanted to be like Glenn (why wouldn’t he? Glenn was skilled, competent, worked for what he believed in) but he was sick and tired of being Glenn’s replacement.

He changed the way he tied his hair when she said that. Pulling it back had always been enough for him, but for the first time in months he stared at a mirror and twisted his hair around until he no longer looked like the slowly fading memory of Glenn’s face.

He wondered if his father had thought the same, watching him grow. Seeing Glenn grow up a second time, except he wasn’t Glenn. He would never be Glenn.

Thinking about being Glenn made him want to scream and he still didn’t know why.

-

“You know you could date any girl in this room if you wanted to,” Sylvain said, sidling up to him on the night of the ball.

“I don’t want to,” he said. Women, relationships. It was all about expectations and things he couldn’t be bothered to do. Maybe a handful of things he didn’t think he could do.

“The girls love a brooding noble,” Sylvain said. Always with the needling. Knowing that anything he did would be useless in pushing him away, Felix said nothing. “You’re good looking, and you know you don’t look half bad when you smile.”

“Those lines won’t work on me, Sylvain,” he said firmly. Good looking. Ha. Sylvain would say that to anyone with a face. His traitorous mind filled in the gap. Sylvain would say that to anyone with a feminine face. A pretty face. He was always telling girls to smile. “Go and chat up someone else. I’m not one of your endless string of girlfriends.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Sylvain asked. He was trying to catch Felix’s eyes. He was not going to meet them. He always saw happier times gone sour in those eyes. “Come on, Felix, I was just trying to get you to take a little pride in yourself. Your skill with a sword isn’t your only good trait.”

“It’s the only one that matters,” he said. It was a good excuse, too. “How pretty your face is won’t matter if you’re dead. I’m going to train.” He turned and left, not looking back to see if Sylvain was watching him go or not. If Sylvain was going to have a good time tonight, someone else would just have to pick up the slack to keep him alive. It may as well be him.

-

When Felix was eighteen, he became uncomfortably aware that he had surpassed his brother in the only way he could ever be sure of. Every age added to his life, every last instance of growth from then...he was growing away from his brother.

Yet it didn’t feel like he was. It was no easier to face himself in the mirror with the knowledge that he was now an adult. Now that he’d outlived the man he still lived in the shadow of.

His father didn’t visit; Felix had told him not to bother. They’d seen each other once in the last year, and that single time was on the battlefield. He’d feigned illness when his father was visiting Garreg Mach, so if his father had come he would have just spent his time with the boar instead.

He drank tea with the Professor in the afternoon, instead. He hadn’t told anyone it was his birthday, hoping they’d all forget and not make a fuss, but clearly they knew anyway. Felix supposed he didn’t mind, because the Professor didn’t judge him for a thing.

“You’ve grown into an even more talented young man over the course of the time I’ve known you,” they said at the end of their afternoon together. “You worked hard. I’m glad you took the break today.”

Felix nodded, staring resolutely at the mostly empty cup in front of him. It was a blend of tea he liked, because the Professor had some kind of sixth sense for that kind of thing. “You have something on your mind,” they continued. He made a noncommittal sound. Of course he had something on his mind, he had a brain. He didn’t say that, though. “Birthdays can be like that, you know. Is it about your brother?”

“Glenn was seventeen when he died,” he said. Goddess, he didn’t know how the Professor managed to draw this stuff out of him. They didn’t say anything, just nodded and sat there in silence. Waiting to see if he had anything more to say. “Everyone thinks I look like him but it’s been so long. I barely remember how he looked, how he sounded.” He was fairly sure he’d put Glenn out of his mind for a while when it hurt too much, not realising that he’d forget. He didn’t know if he should care.

“There’s no shame in that,” they said. “Was he a good brother?”

“Does it matter?” he asked. The answer to the question was yes, but it didn’t matter. Being a good brother hadn’t saved him. Being a good person wouldn’t bring him back from the dead. Being a good knight wouldn’t make Felix want to follow him down that path.

“That’s for you to decide,” they said. “And it’s the same for if it matters that you look like him. If it matters to you, then that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to matter. You’re your own person, Felix.”

“Hmph,” he managed. He didn’t think he could quite translate his feelings into words. He made an excuse to leave fairly quickly after that, and spent the rest of the day undoing all of the rest he’d given to his muscles. He tried not to think about the implications of their words.

-

He was twenty two and Dimitri greeted him with a broken “Glenn?” when he saw him for the first time in nearly five years. Felix spat on the ground in front of him, threw out some harsh words he didn’t care to dwell on (he doubted that wild animal heard them either), and ran away.

Felix knew he looked like Glenn. It was something he’d long since accepted. Something that his father told him, occasionally, when he was in a good mood. When he was trying to bridge the gap between them that Felix wanted to remain a yawning chasm.

His father was so desperate to have his son back that he’d never even objected when Felix said he wanted a different name and cut all his hair off (with a sword. Bad decisions were made when Felix was fourteen and he should have at least used a dagger). He had no interest in being a replacement Glenn, but every time it was mentioned, he thought of the Professor’s words. It didn’t need to matter. It didn’t need to hurt.

It still hurt when the empty shell he used to call his best friend couldn’t even see him for who he was. That night, he stood in front of the grimy mirror in the low candlelight and stared at himself.

He was no longer so round, so soft at the edges. War had made his face leaner, harsher. He couldn’t see a childish light fill his eyes, nor could he imagine he ever would again. He wasn’t a child on the cusp of something more any longer, and the memory of his younger self was a long way away.

He could look in the mirror now and fight back the twinge of sadness. He didn’t really look like Glenn. And if he did, the only person it mattered to was Dimitri, and it wasn’t like he was really alive anymore either.

He brushed the strands of hair away from his face, undid the fastenings, and let it fall about his shoulders. He looked in the mirror, closed his eyes, and pulled it up into the ponytail that Glenn had sported all the time.

When he opened his eyes, he immediately squeezed them shut again. Who was he kidding? Certainly not himself. He didn’t look like Glenn. He just looked like a little girl who’d been pretending to be Glenn since he died.

He didn’t have the energy to pin his hair back up in place, so he abandoned it. He pulled one of the spare blankets off the bed and draped it over the mirror. Back to his old methods of avoiding the truth.

He thought he’d grown up, but nothing had changed. Maybe it didn’t matter if he looked like Glenn, but he just wished he could convince himself of that.

-

“Sometimes when I catch sight of you out of the corner of my eye in the mornings, you look like Rodrigue,” Dimitri said. Felix was twenty five. When Dimitri had first met his father, the man had already been thirty. He wasn’t sure if that said something about Dimitri’s eyesight or how the war had aged him.

“Too old to be Glenn now, am I?” he asked. He didn’t need to keep his words or tone in check around Dimitri, even if everyone told him to.

“Too beautiful, for one,” Dimitri said, and then spluttered over the implications of his words mixed with his previous statement. “That wasn’t what I meant!” he said the moment Felix started laughing.

“I’m sure my father would be flattered that you think that,” he said, still laughing. Normally he’d reign it in, just in case someone heard, but the way Dimitri looked at him when he laughed made him lightheaded. “But let’s not start this.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, and Felix could hear him sit up in bed while he twisted his hair into place.

“I only just stopped seeing a shallow mockery of Glenn when I look in the mirror,” he said. “I have no desire to start the process all over again.”

“Of course,” Dimitri said. “Forget I said anything.”

“I’m happy to remember you calling my father beautiful,” Felix said, shooting his partner a wicked smile. Dimitri flushed pink. “...think what you like of my appearance, though,” he said. “Just know that who I resemble is no longer important to me.”

He was Felix Hugo Fraldarius. And if he looked like his brother, like his father, or like neither of them, he didn’t care anymore. What mattered was that the person staring back at him in the mirror was undeniably him, and the sight no longer pained him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! :) if you have feelings about trans Felix (or Felix in general - I know I do) please leave a comment or say hi on twitter @samariumwriting where I scream at length about FE3H.


End file.
